D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

Crimson Longinus

Crimson Longinus

Legend
Remathilis said:
Well that brings us round to the OP, doesn't it?

How do you model a Gandalf, Merlin, Harry Potter, Circe, Harry Dresden, Constantine, Stephen Strange, Glinda, and scores of magic user archetypes in one class. Why strap them all with a book and force them to be scholars? Why can't there be a variety of different types of casters? Why shackle them all to one class?
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Fiction where metaphysics of all those different IPs would exist at once would be an utter mess. D&D doesn't need to do that, it shouldn't try to do that. They need to choose how things work in their IP, and coherently represent that.
 

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Yaarel

Yaarel

He Mage
Remathilis said:
Well that brings us round to the OP, doesn't it?

How do you model a Gandalf, Merlin, Harry Potter, Circe, Harry Dresden, Constantine, Stephen Strange, Glinda, and scores of magic user archetypes in one class. Why strap them all with a book and force them to be scholars? Why can't there be a variety of different types of casters? Why shackle them all to one class?
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That is probably useful exercise.

I would translate the characters as something like the following:

Gandalf: level 20 Devotion Paladin

Merlin: Lore Bard (ranging from earlier seer at low tiers to later powerful mage at high tiers)

Kirke: level 16 Lore Bard, expert in Herbalism, potions, and Transmutation and Enchantment spells

Harry Dresden: level 7 Evocation Wizard

John Constantine: level 13 bookish Fiend Warlock, whose "Pact" is involuntary, the demon (devil?) Nergal taking Astra to hell (abyss?)

Glinda of Wizard of Oz: level 13 Enchanter Wizard (she is bookish, intelligent, and fiddles with spell components, despite high Charisma)



John Constantine comes from a lineage of mages, and could be a Sorcerer bloodline, but he himself is explicitly a "warlock" and makes sense as a D&D Warlock too. Altho Constantine minimizes the use of magic, he is reputed to be one of the most powerful warlocks alive.
 

Micah Sweet

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Yaarel said:
A 5e version of Warlord can even use the Warlock chassis. The Warlord class would have Martial spells, namely "maneuvers", written up using the spell format with its flavors carefully nonmagical. That the spell points refresh per Short Rest, to recover from fatigue, is perfect.

Gishy casters might even pick a few of these Martial spells among their respective caster spells.
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They covered this concept for me well enough in Level Up's Marshal class.
 


Chaosmancer

Chaosmancer

Legend
FrogReaver said:
The game itself doesn’t say these things. They are all setting specific elements and will vary from setting to setting.
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The game doesn't say that wizards learn magic through study? Or it doesn't show that a street urchin can learn magic from pickpocketing a book? Because both are explicitly stated.

Is it setting dependent? Sure. But with that we have to then say that everything is setting dependent, including the existence of grass or oxygen. There are clear majorities at play, where the majority of settings include certain baseline elements.

FrogReaver said:
Not to the degree you are advocating for.
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I'm not advocating for a degree, I'm stating how the worlds of DnD work. I haven't actually proposed a single new thing for anyone to do, just that the human fighter is capable of supernatural feats.
 


Chaosmancer

Chaosmancer

Legend
Yaarel said:
AD&D is a "generic" game. It encouraged and even required DMs to invent their own settings. I have played old school games. They can be anything from Tolkien to amusement parks to the exploration of a scifi 4-dimensional hypercube.
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I've run 5e in a modern post-apocalypse and sci-fi settings.

AD&D was no different than 5e in that regard. It was still not a generic game.
 

Chaosmancer

Chaosmancer

Legend
FrozenNorth said:
I can see why you would want to do it, I just don’t see Ex and Su enabling this sort of play.

Take your example. There isn’t a fighter ability that permits you to leap 40’ and attack. You could fall back on the Jumping rules to argue that with a sufficiently high Athletics check, you should be able to make a 40’ leap. But the Jumping rules apply to everyone, so they are tagged Mundane.

So either way, it just comes down to the DM. Meanwhile, at the next table over, the player’s fighter is Mr. Mundane (by which I mean, he’s just a regular farmboy who’s strong and good at wielding a scythe), but has no trouble clearing the leap because D&D is a game of heroic fantasy. That’s what it says right on the cover and several times in the book.
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It is step one in the process.

I don't want abilities, per se, labeled as Ex or Su. I want the classes labeled that. That way, when the ability for the fighter is proposed, there isn't this pushback about "but the Fighter can't do that!" All these people demanding to see where it says that impossible things are possible for high level characters, we will have a place to point to.

Then the fighter can GET the abilities, without all this gnashing of teeth.
 

Chaosmancer

Chaosmancer

Legend
Remathilis said:
The Internet ate my well crafted response, so I'll just sum it up here:

You can't be a mundane hero in a game where 80% of your allies and enemies are not mundane. Eventually, you fall behind. And when you do, you start to rely on magic as a crutch. There is functionally little difference with a fighter who has a flame tongue sword, adamantine armor, and boots of flying and a dragon knight who has hardened scales, coats his blade in dragonfire, and manifests wings except the former was gotten out of a box of DM charity and the latter is a part of the characters identity and abilities. There is no mundane fighter, only one who gets his power in loot boxes.

I'd rather that power be part of the class and since weakening casters is out of the question, let's give the warrior classes what they need to survive. And if that means all farmboys end up the heirs to a mystic tradition of magic knights, I can live with that.
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And to take a moment with that last part. Being the heir to a mystic tradition of magic knights does NOT mean you were born a secret prince, or you drank the heartblood of a dragon. You could just have learned or even created the techniques that you are using. You could have been nothing special when you were born, what is special is what you DID.
 


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